Milloy: A gentle girl becomes a tough woman. But how much more killing can she take?

You may have heard of Asiyah Timimi, an anti-violence activist in D.C. and mother of three sons. She has been in the news lately because of her advocacy and because each of her sons has been a victim of gun violence. Two of them are mostly recovered from their injuries, but the youngest, age 27, remains paralyzed after being shot in the spine last year. I met Timimi during a recent discussion about solutions to gun violence held at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in the District. She was advocating for better mental health services. Her son had become so depressed about being paralyzed, she said, that he would try to roll his wheelchair into oncoming traffic. “It’s not easy to get the mental health care that you need because the whole city is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder,” she said.